


Eight Weeks

by Vituperative_cupcakes



Category: Red Eye (2005)
Genre: Other, onesided obsession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-09
Updated: 2015-07-09
Packaged: 2018-04-08 11:18:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4302759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vituperative_cupcakes/pseuds/Vituperative_cupcakes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eight weeks he had been watching her. Eight weeks he had studied her. Eight weeks he fell for her.<br/>Eight weeks, and he began to hate her a little.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eight Weeks

The first week he watched her. He watched her come home, slip off her work pumps and let down that auburn hair. He watched her get the mail, answer the phone, and watch TV. He watched her shop. He watched her do housework. He watched her do naughty things under the covers because she thought no one was looking.

He saw her behave like any other woman her age.

The second week he got bored, made up a little game. Anytime she answered the phone, he pretended to be on the other end. He was fair at reading lips. When she said to give Mr. Peterson the room facing away from the pool, he cracked that a little change like that wasn't going to stop his chronic masturbating. When she said to comp the Worleys because they had a habit of flooding hotel sites with bad reviews, he said they shouldn't humor extortionists and the whole family should be rounded up and shot. She laughed, shoulders shaking, beauty mark dancing. It was such a sight it took him a second to remember they weren't actually on the phone together.

The third week he started to really notice her. That was how it went. First the big details fell away, and then he truly started breathing in his subjects. She had a habit of chewing down her anxiety. At first he dismissed it as just a silly little feminine trick, but then he realized, after a few days thought, how smart it really was. She wasn't swallowing her anxiety, she was _eating_ it. She took her fear and turned it into fuel. He couldn't help but admire that. Still, he had to make a mental note. It would be best to break her down quickly, give her no space to recover.

The fourth week, and he wondered how she didn't have a boyfriend. She was, he had to admit, quite attractive. In a physical sense. And she had an aura of surety, a self-confidence untainted by the ego attractive women tended to get. She got up, went to work, got home, ate, slept, and did nothing much beside that. Her utter dedication to professionalism reminded him of himself, actually. And that was something else he had to admire. She never raised her voice, never looked panicked, always the consummate professional.

...of course, there were magnitudes of difference between what he did and what she did. As he watched her through binoculars, he tried imagining her in some of his scenarios. How would she do procuring hypodermic needles in Beirut at 2 in the morning? Coaxing a Nicaraguan border guard to look past their passports? He imagined her maintaining her calm, throaty tone as she sweet-talked the gun from her forehead.

The fifth week found him stalling for time. He needed to find a weak spot. Of course, a woman who had no real connection to the society around her was one big weak spot. If she didn't show up for work one day, who would go after her? That dithering desk girl, Cynthia? Her armchair-jockey of a father? If he stole her away, could anyone really stop it?

No, he decided, watching her practice yoga in an old star wars t shirt, abducting her wasn't the key. She would never bargain for herself. She wasn't that kind of person. She had to be obligated.

He marveled at that. He, too, had done nothing but live for other people in his job, but it was all really for himself. If the chips came down, his employers knew exactly how far they could trust him. That was why they paid him so well. But Lisa went out of her way to make sure that, if people weren't necessarily happy, that they were satisfied.

Had she been brainwashed so thoroughly by her vocation?

He watched her sidestep a homeless man on her way into the store. She came out with a sack of groceries and a sandwich, which she gave to the man. She took five steps, turned back, and gave the man a bottle of water as well.

No, he decided. No. She was just like that.

By the sixth week his little phone game had taken on a different tone. He practiced flirting with her, complementing her hair, her grace, even that little sniff she gave the sea breeze she invariably ordered. He told himself he was just practicing for the day they had to meet, which did nothing to quell the doubt in him.

When was the last time he had been with a woman? A truly warm, willing woman. A woman who looked at him with eyes like hers, smiling so that matching dimples appeared in her cheeks.

He felt suddenly disgusted with himself and berated himself for losing sight of the target. He made himself plot out lines of action, practicing threats tailored to her psychological profile.

Somewhere during the seventh week, she answered the phone. She clapped a hand to her mouth and her shoulders shook. He had to wait an entire day for the report to reach him before he could find out: her grandmother had died. Familial attachment was truly alien to him, but watching her, he could almost understand it. She still moved throughout the day with professional ease, but he detected a listlessness in her. She would catch sight of her reflection and stare at it, as if drinking in the melancholy of her image.

Oddly enough, he felt...sympathy? Empathy? Some sort of -pathy, though he did not expend too much time trying to unpack it. She spent long minutes on the phone with her father, showing a tenderness she displayed nowhere else. He watched her, in those unguarded minutes, brushing hair from her eyes(a nervous tic almost certainly weeded out from her professional demeanor) dawdling her fingertips on the countertop. He wanted to ask her things then. He wanted to talk with her, not her job, because no one had ever done him that courtesy. He wanted to walk with her, just a little while, and watch how she moved around him. How her guard would slowly drop, how she'd slowly transform from her practiced hospitality-smile to a real one. He wanted to scare her a little, to see if she would duck away, or if she would stand up to him. He wanted to talk with someone, if not the same species, then at least in the same kingdom.

By the eighth week he had begun to hate her a little. She was flying out for grandma's funeral. _Bad._ He would have to follow her. _Worse_. He convinced himself that the clench in his stomach was resentment at the inconvenience. He wasn't nervous at all to meet her. Why should he be? She should be nervous to meet him. 

He watched her float through life inconsequentially, making no life-or-death decisions and hated her. Because she could never be his. Through the simple arithmetic available to him, he had worked out that they were completely incompatible. She would never bring that smile, that confidence to him. Not the real him. Though they were alike, she was still burdened by the chains of morality. She could never accept him. Not really. Though, on some level, she would probably be able to understand him. And be revolted by it.

Well. As his father had said, familiarity breeds contempt.

He stood behind her in line, watching all the little unguarded movements. She wasn't a hospitality drone now. She was little Lisa on a trip. He watched her cushion the people around her, offering up her self even though it wasn't required of her, not today.

He smiled and prepared to make himself known.

 


End file.
